Former care worker slams ‘NHS Airbnb scheme’, claiming it would be a way to treat the vulnerable with ‘contempt’

Eileen Chubb, 56, founder and director of Compassion in Care, claims the ‘ridiculous’ idea of sending patients to recover in a stranger’s spare room would make them ‘easy prey’ and puts them at risk of exploitation

By Hayley Richardson

26th October 2017, 4:50 pm

Updated: 26th October 2017, 5:45 pm

A FORMER care worker says plans for an Airbnb-style plan to rent spare bedrooms to NHS patients - which now seem unlikely to go ahead - would simply allow the vulnerable to be treated with "contempt".

The scheme was intended for people who are 'medically fit for discharge but that had no one to go home to'

Homeowners would be subjected to security checks, with a patient's medical needs dealt with by care visitors.

Eileen Chubb, a former care worker and founder and director of Compassion in Care, blasted the idea, telling The Sun Online: "If that is actually somebody’s idea of a plan, I suggest that they need to go to their GP and get some kind of treatment.

"It’s opening up a situation that is going to be widely exploited. You can see people cramming vulnerable adults, maybe people with learning difficulties, into a back bedroom.

"They'll have a front bedroom for show when someone comes round to assess the place, but you can see what’s going to happen.

"It’s unscrupulous enough within the care sector without bringing in private landlords.

"You’re opening up easy prey for anybody that wants to exploit people, you’ll end up with elderly people in some peoples’ garden shed."

CareRooms, which has a website that remains live, claims the model provides "a safe, comfortable place for people to recuperate from hospital", as well as helping to tackle bed-blocking, which is at a record high.

She explained: "I hate the term 'bed-blocker', because it’s basically branding people who, through no fault of their own, have ended up in hospital.

"Most elderly people who are being admitted to hospital are being admitted from care homes and care situations.

"If we had a decent care system, those people wouldn’t have been admitted to hospital in the first place. That’s what needs to be tackled, instead of treating people as bed-blockers.

"The government is not tackling what the problem is, which is not that we don’t have enough care providers, it’s the fact that we have no control over these care providers and the standards of care that they’re providing.

"The public are picking up the cost of that, because people are being admitted to hospital because they’re neglected in the first place."

Although CareRooms promises that potential hosts would be vetted and interviewed, Eileen pointed out that authorities struggle to carry out proper checks on care homes, never mind private homes.

Compassion in Care is campaigning for Ednas Law, which is demanding better vetting systems for care homes

"I can’t see how they can vet people’s private homes when they can’t even manage a regulator that’s up to the job of inspecting care homes.

"If somebody said to me, ‘What about putting people on a rocket and transporting them to Mars’, I wouldn’t be as shocked as I am – I wouldn’t be any more shocked by that scheme than I am by this scheme.

"It’s not dealing with the problem. The problem, as we’ve always said, is the fact that people are in hospital because they were neglected in the first place."

CareRooms medical director Harry Thirkettle, a part-time emergency registrar in Essex, told the HSJ: “Everyone’s immediate concern is, understandably, safeguarding. We are working hard to be better than standard practice.

“We are not going off half-cocked… We are not going to start taking on patients until we have satisfied all these different organisations’ governance procedures and committees.

"We are really carefully considering this and making sure it is as safe as possible.”

Eileen is not alone in her concerns.

The Save Southend A&E campaign group, whose members include doctors in Essex, warned the new scheme could "open a huge can of worms".